Home > Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor in USA

Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor in USA

by Open-Publishing - Friday 26 August 2005
12 comments

Poverty-Precariousness USA

By Astrid Barnet

A recent study published by the University of Pennsylvania
revealed that over 36 million Americans currently live under the
poverty line, 4.3 million under the Bush administration.

According to the author of the report, Richard Estes, President
of the International Society of Studies on the Quality of Life,
chronic poverty is a major threat for social progress in the US.

Despite its economic power, the budget cuts in social services
and chronic poverty have placed the country in 27th place among
160 countries as far as the quality of life. The document adds
that a recent analysis by the Pew Center revealed that the
economic gap between white and African American and Latino
families continues to increase.

According to the Pew Center, the African American and Latino
communities are also the most vulnerable in an economic crisis
and the most affected by unemployment, diseases and unexpected
emergency spending.

“We must point out that close to 27 percent of the Latino and
African American workers with 20 million dependent children are
living in poverty.”

Since the day in January 2002 when President Bush announced the
law “No Child Left Behind” for all public school children to
receive a quality education, the only thing the president has
achieved is creating a crisis with the sharp budget cuts in
important educational programs, says the report.

The No Child Left Behind program has all but failed as it lacks
33.2 billion dollars in funding, including 22.4 billion for
Title 1 programs for low income children to learn how to read
and write.

The Bush administration also eliminated 247 million dollars for
family home reading programs, one of them for children under
seven, transferring the projects federal funds to state programs
with low standards. AIN Special Service

Forum posts

  • Chavez offered cheap oil and health care for the American poor.

    Bush offers: war, debt, hate, body bags and high gasoline prices.

    ...tell me where the intellectuals are, where have they gone? Will they ever learn? The American dream is in jeopardy and may be it exists only for the rich.

  • It is time to exorcise ourselves of Bush and Cheney.....IMPEACH and prosecute for war crimes and treason!!

  • The problem is not the difference between the wealthy and the impoverished, it’s the poverty. You’ve got to understand that your wealth does not cause my poverty. If you have more wealth, that does not make me poorer. The economy is not a zero-sum game.

    I think you’d be happier about a lot of things if you’d study some basic economics. It’s not as dry and boring as you might expect.

    Naturally, they don’t bother to teach this stuff in schools anymore. It makes people less dependent on the gov’t, and we can’t have that, can we?

    • Creationism and government/church propaganda has taken the place of useful education in the U.S.A., we have Bu$hco to thank for that.

    • This is one of the most simplistic defenses of wealth versus poverty I’ve ever seen on Bellaciao. Don’t you think that the top executives of Big Oil, whose component companies are recording record profits, are going to realize huge bonuses? And, from where is this bonus money coming? From YOU and me and all of the other hapless Americans who are caught in the grip of this greedy surge in gas prices. Without a raise to compensate you for the extra cost of the gas and oil, aren’t you more impoverished than you were last year and the year before that? The economy is a zero-sum game in this instance. The oil executives are getting more while we are getting less.

    • Your anti-Bush sports-fan sloganeering is puerile. Economics haven’t been taught in public schools in the past several decades, at least.

    • You correctly observe that wealth is being "defended," thus conceding that it is under attack (by you). You attack wealth . . . you must be pro-poverty, because if you don’t respect property rights, that’s what you’re selling.

      I defend ALL rights. Freedom of speech and association, freedom to worship as you wish (or not to worship), the right to bear arms, property rights, equal treatment under the law, etc. Obviously, you feel that some of these rights are mean, grubby, second-tier rights that you are free to trample.

    • Listen, Bub, I don’t have time for your amateurish sophistry. You made a dumb statement that wealth has nothing to do with poverty, which I refuted with a simple illustration. Go argue with the boys at the sports bar if you can tear yourself away from watching the baseball game on the TV. And, if I ever hear you gripe about the rising price of gas that is putting a bigger and bigger dent in your wallet, I’m going to send ExxonMobil’s CEO over to your house to laugh at you. You’ll know who he is. He’ll be the one getting out of the chauffeur-driven limo.

    • "My argument smart. Yours dumb. You dumb."

      Yeah, you’ve really got me squirming in the crushing jaws of reason, there.

      Forgive me if I disagree.

      Too smart for baseball, huh? What do you do for fun?

    • By the way, you’re still wrong. Wealth doesn’t cause poverty. If it did, things would never get better anywhere. Japanese, Americans, and Germans are, on average, wealthier now than in 1930. The poor in these counties are much wealthier than their 1930 counterparts. Wealth has been created in these countries.

      Saudis, on the other hand, are much poorer now than two decades ago. Per capita income has dropped from around 20k to about 7k. (At least, those were the stats about five years ago.)

    • As usual you do not have any idea what you are talking about....yet you insist on coming here to post non sense and pretend that you are an authority. You belong on the Republican sites where you can all sing the same old tunes and bore the hell out of everyone by reinforcing your narrow mindness and myopic views about EVERYTHING to the same kind of sycophants.

    • Thanks 4 244 for telling twit 65 157 that s/he is full of crap. These echo chambers for the greed party - because it includes Republicans and Democrats - see poverty and wealth as primarily a moral issue, even though they will spew irrelevant economic drivel to prove their point. To wit - poor people are in this condition due to some inherent moral defect while wealthy people - those hard working pillars of society - have earned their loot because of their moral superiority. It is all just a rationalization to make them feel better about themselves while they’re hogging the trough either because they’re connected, have inherited their money, are downright dishonest, or a little of all of the above. Too bad these leeches don’t consider suicide as the highest virtue. Then, we can sit back and watch them disappear - one by one.